


If we burn it down and it takes all night

by bookishandbossy



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Fluff, Getting Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 07:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14539665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: The first time that Jyn Erso meets Cassian Andor, she's three shots of tequila in and about to take a very stupid bet.  She'd like not to like him.  Her heart has other plans.





	If we burn it down and it takes all night

**Author's Note:**

> Written for coppernailpolish for the Rebelcaptain May the 4th Exchange on Tumblr. 
> 
> Title from "Slow Burn" by Kacey Musgraves.

The first time that Jyn Erso meets Cassian Andor, she's three shots of tequila in and about to take a very stupid bet in the basement of the Resistance. (That's what Kes Dameron and his roommates decided to call their house for the year and honestly, she's heard worse.) However, it's a very stupid bet that she's going to win. Which is the important thing here. 

She's on top of a pool table, readying herself to make her way from the basement to the attic without touching the floor—the floor is lava, obviously—when she notices the scruffy guy in the corner looking at her. He has a leather jacket on even though it's August and dark hair that goes every which way and looks like he can't decide whether to be amused or horrified at the debauchery going on around him. He raises one eyebrow. You're really going to do this? She stares back and for a minute, as their eyes meet, she feels a warmth in the pit of her stomach that has nothing at all to do with the tequila. He shakes his head, just a little. Seriously? 

She narrows her eyes at him. He narrows his back. Jyn straightens her shoulders, jerks her gaze away from him, and readies herself to leap from the pool table to the couch. She doesn't think about him for the rest of the night. Really.

 

The second time that Jyn Erso meets Cassian Andor, she's over-caffeinated and he's sitting in the hallway in his towel. She's coming back from breakfast with Bodhi (pancakes and eggs and Bodhi's futile attempts to protect his hash browns from her) and she actually stops in the middle of the hallway and turns around when she sees him.

“You glared at me in a basement,” she says as she props her hands on her hips and looks down at him. 

“Nice to meet you too,” he says. “And it wasn't a glare.”

“It was definitely a glare. And you were wearing a leather jacket in the summer,” she points out. She's not sure why she's arguing this point but she is sure that she's going to argue it until he gives up in defeat. “And now apparently a towel.”

“I got locked out and my roommate's not picking up his phone.”

“Is yours the room with a gym sock on the door?” Jyn asks.

He whips his head around and curses, Spanish and English mixing together. He knows some impressive words. 

“So why were you glaring at me the other night?” she asks once he's stopped cursing and settled down to merely shooting death glares in the direction of his door. Seeing him stare at the door like he hopes it incinerates into ash makes her realize that she really got off lightly the other night. 

“It wasn't a glare,” he says again. “And you don't seem to be stupid but you were about to do something incredibly stupid. I'm amazed you didn't break any bones.”

“It was a bet. Now Kes and his house have to buy me pizza for the rest of the month.” She shrugs and slides down the wall to sit across from him. That's when she glances—completely accidentally and she'll swear to it until the day she dies—down at his abs. They're nice. Really nice. And she lived down the hall from the swim team freshman year so it's not like she hasn't seen good abs before. But this is just—Jyn swallows hard and curls her hands into the carpet to stifle the completely stupid urge to touch them. 

(She tells herself she isn't going to look any lower. She completely fails at that.)

“Look,” she says. “I live down the hall. You can borrow one of my t-shirts or something.”

He looks at her suspiciously. Considering that she gives him one of her roommate's old Jonas Brothers tour t-shirts, he's probably right. She does end up caving and letting him eat some of her Cheez-Its though, so on the whole she thinks she's being nice.

 

“You gave him ten whole Cheez-Its,” Bodhi says. “I'll alert the Nobel Committee.”

“And a granola bar,” Jyn points out. “And we watched two episodes of The Americans before his roommate finally let him back in.”

“So what's his name?” Bodhi clearly thinks he's being subtle. He's really not. 

“I didn't ask. He didn't ask either!” she adds when Bodhi looks bemused. 

“What does he look like, then?” Bodhi has his phone out under the table, ready to start scrolling through every last Corsucant University student Facebook group until he finds this guy and can gently tease her about it. Of course, she knows that if she asked him to stop, he'd shove his phone down into the deepest recesses of his backpack and swear never to speak of it again. That's just the kind of person Bodhi is. 

“Messy dark hair, some scruff. Brown eyes. He speaks Spanish and he was wearing this ridiculous leather jacket the first time I saw him.” Jyn pauses and scans the dining hall. “Kind of like the jacket that that guy over there is wearing. Brown leather and a little scuffed--”

She breaks off mid-sentence when she realizes that it's the exact same jacket. And now they've made eye contact. And he's looking at her like he's expecting her to say something and she's raising her arm to wave at him before she realizes what a truly terrible idea that is and out of the corner of her eye she actually sees Bodhi's jaw drop all the way down until it hits one of his french fries.

She still thinks that the leather jacket is ridiculous. And totally impractical for the early September heat. But it does stretch perfectly across his shoulders and she does like the way his hair just barely brushes the collar of it.

“Hi,” he says, standing there. There's a plate full of mandarins on his tray and another with what appears to be every single thing offered in the salad bar. 

“Hey,” she says and dips another fry in barbecue sauce. 

“I'm Bodhi,” Bodhi finally says after a while, when it becomes apparent that they're just going to stare each other down.

“Cassian.” He smiles and slides into the chair next to Jyn. His hip brushes hers as he leans over to grab a handful of napkins and she's mad at herself for even noticing it.

“Jyn,” she says. He smiles wider and reaches across to swipe a fry from her plate. She glares at him and lets him eat one of her fries anyway. 

She would steal some of his food back but there's no way she's eating the pasta salad thing with olives that covers half of his plate. So Jyn tells him that and then they're arguing about olives and he's half-laughing and she might be laughing too and there's still something sharp between them and something that's nearly soft too.

Under his breath, Bodhi says something about the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

 

They fall into a friendship half by accident. She sees Cassian sitting at a table in the dining hall and goes to sit next to him because she's all out of podcasts to listen to and she took too many curly fries anyway. (And because he looks up at her from across the room with a half smile and shifts his tray over before she even starts walking in his direction.) She knocks on his door one Thursday night and asks if she can borrow his laptop charger and ends up watching Netflix in the lounge with him for two and a half hours. (And he laughs at the right parts and lets her grip his arm instead of the couch cushion during the cliffhangers.) She sees him at a party at Kes' house and they lean against the wall sipping cheap beer and judging people together. (And he still wears that leather jacket.)

They're both on their third drink and talking about how terrible the music is when she glances over and finds him looking at her mouth. She's wearing red lipstick tonight, courtesy of Leia, that's somehow managed to stay on through the night and she could almost swear that she feels his gaze tracing the lines of her lips. He should look away, she thinks hazily, mumble some excuse and drop his eyes back down to the ground or to the grinding masses in Kes' basement. Or she should look away. But instead his eyes stay on her mouth for a minute more before they drift back up to meet hers. And she's—she's feeling a surge of heat through her veins and her hands are restless at her sides and she wants so badly to do something and she doesn't know what. 

“I like the lipstick,” he says and his mouth curves up at one corner.

She mutters a thank you and dedicates herself to peeling the label off her beer bottle. It's purely by accident that she ends up edging over across the wall towards him until their shoulders are touching. Kes' basement is crowded and she doesn't have the energy to glare at the couple making out next to her. And Cassian has a nice shoulder. Not that she'll ever tell him. 

“I like the jacket,” she finally says. “But I'll deny it like hell when I'm sober again.”

Later that night, she falls asleep to muddled thoughts of dark eyes and how the stubble on his chin might feel against her skin and wakes up in the middle of the night flushed and short of breath. She tries to drown the memory the next morning with strong coffee and sugary cereal. She doesn't entirely succeed.

 

Two weeks later, Cassian finds her crying in the library,down on the bottom floor where no one ever goes because it's supposed to be haunted. It's the sixth anniversary of her mother's death. He doesn't ask her why she's crying or why she's flipping through the same ten photos on her phone over and over or why she's wedged herself against the wall in this tiny corner where nothing can sneak up on her. He just pulls a chair over and lets her rest her head on his shoulder while she cries and gets streaks of eyeliner all over his white shirt. After a few minutes, he softly rubs her back with one hand and she slumps into him and cries even harder.

They go get dinner afterward and watch movies until two in the morning and he lets her breathe and not say anything as she methodically eats all the popcorn and curls herself against him on the beat-up plaid couch he managed to squeeze into his room. It's not okay, exactly. Some things about losing her mom are never going to be. But with Cassian, it's like everything feels a little bit safer than it did before.

Before, she thought that her wanting him was a matter of the curve of his mouth and the stretch of his shoulders. Now, she realizes that it might be tangled up with something else altogether. 

 

Jyn has never been a people person. Bodhi always jokes that she's like a cat, liking a few people immensely and ignoring or actively disliking anyone else. She's known Bodhi since middle school, when they sat next to each other at the bus and swapped Harry Potter books in silence. Bodhi met Chirrut Imwe and his boyfriend Baze Malbus at a barbecue freshman year and she likes them enough to go out for sushi and to the movies with them every few weeks. Leia's won her over through sheer stubbornness and the best milkshakes in all of Coruscant. She didn't even like Cassian when she first met him. And now she spots him from across the quad or sitting in the lounge and she wants to wrap herself around him and leave her mark. 

It's inexplicable and she doesn't like it.

They argue half the time anyway—about the merits of their various majors, about her dubious food choices, about whether Westworld is ever going to make any sense, about if Han's beat-up car can get them to the beach and back again without divine intervention, about books and movies and the ongoing battle for funding between the campus film society and the campus cheese club, and occasionally about the ultimate meaning of life. (He's taking a philosophy class and occasionally she fantasizes about hurtling his textbook out the window.) The other half of the time, they sit in peaceful silence in the lounge doing homework together or watch B-movie marathons at the local movie theater or browse the stacks at Yoda's Books or hunt for the perfect cup of coffee. And eventually, she's forced to admit to herself that Cassian Andor is a fundamentally good person. He tutors students at the local high school and edits their essays until his pen runs out of ink and his eyes cross. He calls his _abuela_ every Sunday night and reassures her that yes, he's eating right and getting enough sleep. He wants to be a social worker. He listens to everything she says like it really matters. And there's no way she'll ever deserve him.

 

“It's not about _deserving_ ,” Leia says fiercely. Leia says almost everything fiercely but today she's gesticulating with the straw from her milkshake so energetically that she already got whipped cream in Luke's face twice. “If you want him, you should go and get him.”

“I didn't say that I wanted him.”

Leia gives her the stare that's the terror of rowdy frat boys everywhere and then pulls out one of her yellow legal pads. “We're going to make a plan,” she says. “And we're not going to listen to anything that Han says because Han ended up in a person-sized Jello mold the last time he made the plan.”

“I think if it's meant to happen, it'll happen,” Luke says calmly and opens his eyes to take another sip of his milkshake. Jyn could have sworn that he was meditating two minutes ago. Leia's twin brother got into this weird martial arts thing last year and ever since then, he's been doing his best impression of a Zen monk. Occasionally, he snaps out of it to win beer pong tournaments with Han. 

Leia just rolls her eyes affectionately at him and goes back to her bullet points.

 

“This is a scary list,” Bodhi says later. “I'm not sure where we're supposed to get the fireworks, the bourbon, and the miniature Australian shepherd anyway.”

“I shouldn't do anything,” Jyn says, awkwardly shifting around on Bodhi's desk chair. “It would just make things awkward.”

Bodhi mutters something under his breath about just wanting to eat his lunch without any unresolved sexual tension.

“There's nothing—I don't know if there's anything for him,” she amends and tries to shut out any memories of Kes' basement. Because they were both drinking and she's not sure if he looked at her just to look or for something more and she doesn't want to ask herself which one she was hoping for. (Because it'll inevitably won't be that.)

“I don't even know what there is for me,” she adds. 

“Then you'll figure it out.” Bodhi says like it's that simple. Jyn gets the feeling that he actually believes she will. It makes her feel both better and worse at the same time.

 

She tries to analyze it. Asks herself whether the rush she's starting to get at the sight of him is pure chemical lust. Asks herself if she's just been waiting to want someone and he came around at the right time. Asks herself why she's even thinking about it in the first place.

The answers she gets aren't the ones she wants. There's nothing chemical about the way she finds herself wanting to tell him whatever's happened to him. There's been boys before, in dark basement corners and cramped dorm beds, and she's forgotten about them by the time she's laced up her boots and walked out the door. There's no reason why she should keep thinking about it and yet she does it anyway. 

Cassian asks her if she's okay while they're studying one day and she doesn't know how to answer him. They're across from each other at one of the tiny two-person tables squeezed into the third floor of the library. Usually, they only sit at those tables if all the other ones are taken but she likes being so close to him that their knees bump together when she leans forward and that their foreheads nearly brush when they're both bent over their work. He's warm and smells faintly like coffee and the ginger cookies from their favorite bakery and something uniquely _Cassian_ that makes her want to bury her face in the crook of his neck. She's ridiculous.

“There's something I have to say to someone,” she tells him, twisting her pen between two fingers. “And I don't know if I should say it.”

“What happens if you do say it?” he asks.

“I don't know.”

“And what happens if you don't say it?”

“I don't know that either.” Jyn stares fiercely down at her economics textbook.

“So either way you take a chance. I'm not sure what you want, but I think I'd rather take a chance instead of letting chance take me,” Cassian says. “Just to finally do something.”

She doesn't mean to look up at him but his eyes snag hers and no matter how many breaths she tries to draw in, she can't seem to quite fill her lungs. Her heart is pounding loudly enough that he must be able to hear it and she inches her hand across the table until it's just touching his.

Cassian wraps his hand around hers and squeezes and she thinks hazily that this has to be what it's like to yearn for someone. The jazz singer crooning in a smoky club at two am, pages of discarded poetry, twisting sharp and sweet way that she never really thought she'd feel for anyone. It's probably going to ruin her. She doesn't care. 

 

Leia keeps on sending her links to fireworks warehouses that are just across the state line. Bodhi gives her encouraging pep talks. Jyn does nothing. Until she gets locked out of her room on a rainy Wednesday in early November and knocks on Cassian's door. 

“I don't know when Shara's getting back and she's turned off her phone,” she says to him with a grimace. “I hope you have good snacks.”

“Goldfish, granola bars, and two and a half donuts left over from this morning. Maybe leftover pizza if no one's stolen it out of the dorm fridge yet.” He swings the door wider and ushers her in, the entire side of her body sliding across his as she squeezes through the narrow door frame. 

She settles herself on the end of his bed and, even if it's always felt daring every time she puts herself in his space, she could swear that there's a crackle of something through the air as she tucks her legs underneath her and pulls his plaid blanket across her lap.

“I saved a cinnamon sugar donut for you too,” Cassian says and extends the box towards her. He makes her the tea that she likes but never buys herself and lets her hoard his blankets as they set up on his bed and is careful and deliberate with her in a way that makes her heart surge.

They're halfway through an episode of something that she's paid exactly zero attention to when she reaches over and hits the pause button.

“What are you doing Friday night?” she blurts out.

“Nothing yet,” he says, looking over at her curiously.

“Maybe we could do something then? Go to a movie or out to dinner or whatever. Just the two of us.” She tries desperately to keep her tone casual and doesn't think it's working. “If you're interested, of course.”

“Dinner and a movie. Just the two of us,” Cassian repeats.

“Yes.” This was a terrible idea, she thinks as she steels herself for the inevitable. A terrible, terrible--

“Jyn, are you saying what I think you're saying?” His eyes are bright and wide, his hands not entirely steady, his breath fast—and it hits her like a lightning strike. Cassian is scared too. Of all the unspoken words that hum between them, of the way they might get twisted and bent out of shape, of the things that they might come to mean to each other. Of everything they've been trying to resist. 

She's still scared. Terrified, some days. But maybe they'll be scared together.

“Yes,” she says. “I am.”

She kisses him then. He kisses back like he's been waiting all his life to do it. It's nothing like she imagined it would be. It's everything she's ever wanted. He's hot and fierce and takes her breath away and she takes his right back, mouths and tongues and teeth. Cassian has his mouth on her neck, sucking lightly at her pulse point and she has her hands under his shirt, roaming across the skin that she's been thinking about for months now and it's—there are fireworks going off underneath her skin and all she can think is that she wants more.

She pushes forward slightly, toppling him backward into the sheets, and he huffs out a laugh.

“Of course you want to be on top,” he says. 

“You like it,” she says back and straddles his hips. He lets out a sigh that she immediately wants to make him make again.

What they do together is far from perfect. There are fumblings and awkward pauses where they laugh and she nearly hits her head against the wood of his headboard. And in another way, it's absolutely perfect. His hands leave streaks of heat across her skin and their mouths seek each other endlessly and sometimes, when he thinks she's not looking, she catches him looking at her with something like awe. 

 

“I don't just want this,” she tells him afterward, her head propped against his chest. “I want every last bit of it. The good parts and the bad. I'm not sure how it's all going to end up but I want to try.”

“Then we'll try,” Cassian says simply. “I think I like our chances.”

She likes them too.


End file.
